"The solution is NOT a volume limit, the solution is to have dynamic range in the files themselves, and put a limiter in the playback device."
I think that's what they're proposing. Radio stations and streaming services adhering to the new standard will just normalize everything based on the average intensity rather than the max. Everything's average will be the same. There won't be any incentive to compress the dynamic range. Most playback devices already have adjustable compression.
You don't understand. Currently technology limits the maximum sound intensity. If your format (through software standards) instead limits the average sound intensity, no song sounds louder than any other. So applying compression only makes your song sound crappy, not louder. The brick wall automatically makes everyone equal in the loudness game, so the incentive for cheating goes away.
I wasn't playing this time, but I was at one (outdoor) performance of the 1812 where the armed forces brought in mobile field artillery and had WWII artillery regiment vet crews come in to fire them off. Sure, it wasn't technically the best performance ever, but seeing the veterans get to team up and fire off the big guns again made it my favourite.
It doesn't prevent them from doing it, but it takes away the incentive. Compression got applied because you wanted your song to sound louder than the others playing on the radio. We perceive, more or less, the average sound pressure as the loudness. So if your average is higher, you sound louder. Since the max sound pressure is limited by the format (and the listener's volume knob), compressing the dynamic range lets you make your song sound louder.
Now, if the format limits average intensity instead of max (or normalizes to the average instead of the max), you can compress your song as much as you want but it won't sound any louder than anything else, just more monotonous and/or distorted.
Take away the incentive to be loud and artists and producers will probably prefer their music sound better.
I generally don't listen to classical in the car, but recently I popped in one of my favourites, Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. I noticed that, at the same volume I was listening to pop/rock immediately before, I couldn't hear anything. I had to turn it up to what would have been earsplitting for the rock CD just to hear anything over the road noise. And a while later it did become earsplitting and I had to turn it back down.
I know most pop/rock doesn't know what dynamics are, but still.
Why shouldn't the scanner have a full copyright... on the particular scanned work? If you don't want to pay his price for it go scan your own.
The original work shouldn't become re-copyrighted, and it doesn't. Shakespeare doesn't suddenly become copyrighted again because somebody published it in paperback.
I suppose if you consider a person as a distribution device I might go for that. Anyway, this article isn't about charging for information and the OPs question wasn't about information. Both are about charging for a PDF document (scanned and probably OCRed, possibly hand proof read and corrected).
The OP specifically said he thought it was okay to cover the costs of hosting the material and making it available. He used a physical copy of "Treasure Island" as an example. Your post certainly seemed to be disagreeing (not agreeing) with his statement.
You're not trying to wiggle out of it now, are you?
Hopefully other people thought about that name more than you did.
Yes, many people using civil disobedience in the US have had an easy ride. Not always, and in general in the world it's not true. But do you really think Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought to himself "damn, I might end up going to jail for more than a weekend? Screw that!"? That the OP seems to think so is sad. I'm not American, but I still admire your real heroes.
The second point is this: think hard about what your country is becoming when you think that black civil rights protesters in the 50s had it easy.
It's too bad you published AC. Mods - this needs to be a +5 Insightful/Informative.
Public domain means you can take a copy of the original and do what you want with it. It doesn't mean you're entitled for someone to do a bunch of work to put it in a convenient format, and then spoon feed it to you.
Yes, if the copies of the original are restricted unreasonably that's a problem. But THAT's the problem, not someone trying to recover their costs for providing a useful service. Particularly not a NON-PROFIT doing so.
Scanning it SHOULD be (and I think it probably is). Same with translations. Both require work, but can be done by anyone. Copyright on the new format/language encourages someone to do it, but if they get carried away charging, someone else can come along and compete.
Um, presumably the same organization that contracted the workers to scan the stuff is the one that's selling the result, to recover costs.
$8/paper sounds like a lot, but there are quite a few papers and they're not exactly hot sellers. It's wonderful that they ARE available, and I'd gladly pay $8 for a copy of an old paper I needed, rather than have to find it, possibly to travel to it's location, and photocopy it myself.
The business model surrounding NEW papers is a bit of a problem, but I don't see the issue with these public domain ones. If you don't want to pay the $8 for company X's scan, go and scan it yourself. And share with us please. If you're reputable, you might even be able to charge a bit....
I guess they are. You just have to go down into the basement of a university library that's old enough to have them, and make a photocopy/scan. Then you can do whatever you want.
When you're done, post a link to Slashdot please - I'm sure we'd all love to have access to these. I personally hate having to trek over to the library when I need an older paper.
FYI - some of the older stuff HAS been scanned and put up on the web for free. I was delighted to find Fourier's original paper/book online when I was writing my thesis.
PubMed doesn't have the organizational or production resources to take over review and publication of every paper in medicine/biotech. That doesn't mean they couldn't eventually, but it certainly won't happen overnight.
Besides, having one journal to rule them all (which is what PubMed would become) isn't such a hot idea either.
I love open access, and I have a couple of things published that way (just got invited to do another book chapter, which I'll squeeze in if at all possible), but the publication costs can really hit hard. The PLOS journals are $1350US on the cheap end (PLOS One - not sure why it's cheapest) to $2250US or $2900US for the others. It's hard to explain to a granting agency (or your supervisor, or a grant administrator) why you want to spend $3000 on a publication in a low impact factor journal instead of nothing on a pub in a well recognized journal.
I think the solution to this problem is going to have to involve the libraries. A little support from them for reputable open journals (there are quite a few not so reputable ones) would go a long way.
Don't forget the every-two-years major desktop OS updates. How long did MS go between XP and Vista? And between XP and another OS someone would want to run? And the yearly hardware updates. The introduction of the new Air, that's turned out to be a big success. They're what, the third largest PC manufacturer now?
Apple buys fabrication services from companies like Samsung. They design the chips. In fact, they went on a fairly recent chip design company buying spree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi.
No, they don't design motherboards from scratch. That would be silly. And the OP didn't suggest any such thing. He said Apple employs hardware engineers (they do) who design their boards, almost certainly starting with reference designs, just like every other motherboard designer. I hate to tell you, but Intel doesn't start from scratch every time they make a new motherboard (or chip) either.
They're relying on you not to install Lion on OTHER people's machines.
I'm not sure if Lion actually checks or not - Apple says you're only supposed to install it on computers you've authorized on your iTunes account. Previous Apple OSes haven't checked anything - you could buy a single copy and install it on all the machines you wanted.
It's not a summary. There doesn't seem to be a link. The "summary" is really a short "story" by some guy that Slashdot apparently decided to post. Essentially it's completely wrong - Lion can be downloaded once and distributed by network, thumb drive, DVD, whatever. Or you can go to an Apple store (soon) and pick up a copy on a thumb drive. Or download your own using their network. And Lion is virtualizable.
Apple does do some custom motherboard and chip design, and works with the likes of Intel for some of it, particularly for special cases like the Air. Apple owns quite a bit of chip design talent.
Why wouldn't it? A private insurance company is going to want to attract customers by offering a low rate, then charge the ones who are accident prone or get sick a lot more.
I can't say how much decent health insurance in the US costs (from Canada), but I have heard Americans pay more for health care than anywhere else in the world. We've recruited a few senior ivy-league university professors from the US who were worried they wouldn't be able to afford adequate insurance when they got older.
Slashdot Mirror
"The solution is NOT a volume limit, the solution is to have dynamic range in the files themselves, and put a limiter in the playback device."
I think that's what they're proposing. Radio stations and streaming services adhering to the new standard will just normalize everything based on the average intensity rather than the max. Everything's average will be the same. There won't be any incentive to compress the dynamic range. Most playback devices already have adjustable compression.
You don't understand. Currently technology limits the maximum sound intensity. If your format (through software standards) instead limits the average sound intensity, no song sounds louder than any other. So applying compression only makes your song sound crappy, not louder. The brick wall automatically makes everyone equal in the loudness game, so the incentive for cheating goes away.
I wasn't playing this time, but I was at one (outdoor) performance of the 1812 where the armed forces brought in mobile field artillery and had WWII artillery regiment vet crews come in to fire them off. Sure, it wasn't technically the best performance ever, but seeing the veterans get to team up and fire off the big guns again made it my favourite.
It doesn't prevent them from doing it, but it takes away the incentive. Compression got applied because you wanted your song to sound louder than the others playing on the radio. We perceive, more or less, the average sound pressure as the loudness. So if your average is higher, you sound louder. Since the max sound pressure is limited by the format (and the listener's volume knob), compressing the dynamic range lets you make your song sound louder.
Now, if the format limits average intensity instead of max (or normalizes to the average instead of the max), you can compress your song as much as you want but it won't sound any louder than anything else, just more monotonous and/or distorted.
Take away the incentive to be loud and artists and producers will probably prefer their music sound better.
They have to make it louder so you can hear it in the bathroom.
I generally don't listen to classical in the car, but recently I popped in one of my favourites, Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. I noticed that, at the same volume I was listening to pop/rock immediately before, I couldn't hear anything. I had to turn it up to what would have been earsplitting for the rock CD just to hear anything over the road noise. And a while later it did become earsplitting and I had to turn it back down.
I know most pop/rock doesn't know what dynamics are, but still.
Why shouldn't the scanner have a full copyright... on the particular scanned work? If you don't want to pay his price for it go scan your own.
The original work shouldn't become re-copyrighted, and it doesn't. Shakespeare doesn't suddenly become copyrighted again because somebody published it in paperback.
I suppose if you consider a person as a distribution device I might go for that. Anyway, this article isn't about charging for information and the OPs question wasn't about information. Both are about charging for a PDF document (scanned and probably OCRed, possibly hand proof read and corrected).
The OP specifically said he thought it was okay to cover the costs of hosting the material and making it available. He used a physical copy of "Treasure Island" as an example. Your post certainly seemed to be disagreeing (not agreeing) with his statement.
You're not trying to wiggle out of it now, are you?
Hopefully other people thought about that name more than you did.
Yes, many people using civil disobedience in the US have had an easy ride. Not always, and in general in the world it's not true. But do you really think Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought to himself "damn, I might end up going to jail for more than a weekend? Screw that!"? That the OP seems to think so is sad. I'm not American, but I still admire your real heroes.
The second point is this: think hard about what your country is becoming when you think that black civil rights protesters in the 50s had it easy.
It's too bad you published AC. Mods - this needs to be a +5 Insightful/Informative.
Public domain means you can take a copy of the original and do what you want with it. It doesn't mean you're entitled for someone to do a bunch of work to put it in a convenient format, and then spoon feed it to you.
Yes, if the copies of the original are restricted unreasonably that's a problem. But THAT's the problem, not someone trying to recover their costs for providing a useful service. Particularly not a NON-PROFIT doing so.
Scanning it SHOULD be (and I think it probably is). Same with translations. Both require work, but can be done by anyone. Copyright on the new format/language encourages someone to do it, but if they get carried away charging, someone else can come along and compete.
Um, presumably the same organization that contracted the workers to scan the stuff is the one that's selling the result, to recover costs.
$8/paper sounds like a lot, but there are quite a few papers and they're not exactly hot sellers. It's wonderful that they ARE available, and I'd gladly pay $8 for a copy of an old paper I needed, rather than have to find it, possibly to travel to it's location, and photocopy it myself.
The business model surrounding NEW papers is a bit of a problem, but I don't see the issue with these public domain ones. If you don't want to pay the $8 for company X's scan, go and scan it yourself. And share with us please. If you're reputable, you might even be able to charge a bit....
I guess they are. You just have to go down into the basement of a university library that's old enough to have them, and make a photocopy/scan. Then you can do whatever you want.
When you're done, post a link to Slashdot please - I'm sure we'd all love to have access to these. I personally hate having to trek over to the library when I need an older paper.
FYI - some of the older stuff HAS been scanned and put up on the web for free. I was delighted to find Fourier's original paper/book online when I was writing my thesis.
As somebody who probably makes his living in an information-based job, be careful.
PubMed doesn't have the organizational or production resources to take over review and publication of every paper in medicine/biotech. That doesn't mean they couldn't eventually, but it certainly won't happen overnight.
Besides, having one journal to rule them all (which is what PubMed would become) isn't such a hot idea either.
I love open access, and I have a couple of things published that way (just got invited to do another book chapter, which I'll squeeze in if at all possible), but the publication costs can really hit hard. The PLOS journals are $1350US on the cheap end (PLOS One - not sure why it's cheapest) to $2250US or $2900US for the others. It's hard to explain to a granting agency (or your supervisor, or a grant administrator) why you want to spend $3000 on a publication in a low impact factor journal instead of nothing on a pub in a well recognized journal.
I think the solution to this problem is going to have to involve the libraries. A little support from them for reputable open journals (there are quite a few not so reputable ones) would go a long way.
Nelson Mandela.
Don't forget the every-two-years major desktop OS updates. How long did MS go between XP and Vista? And between XP and another OS someone would want to run? And the yearly hardware updates. The introduction of the new Air, that's turned out to be a big success. They're what, the third largest PC manufacturer now?
Apple buys fabrication services from companies like Samsung. They design the chips. In fact, they went on a fairly recent chip design company buying spree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi.
No, they don't design motherboards from scratch. That would be silly. And the OP didn't suggest any such thing. He said Apple employs hardware engineers (they do) who design their boards, almost certainly starting with reference designs, just like every other motherboard designer. I hate to tell you, but Intel doesn't start from scratch every time they make a new motherboard (or chip) either.
They're relying on you not to install Lion on OTHER people's machines.
I'm not sure if Lion actually checks or not - Apple says you're only supposed to install it on computers you've authorized on your iTunes account. Previous Apple OSes haven't checked anything - you could buy a single copy and install it on all the machines you wanted.
It's not a summary. There doesn't seem to be a link. The "summary" is really a short "story" by some guy that Slashdot apparently decided to post. Essentially it's completely wrong - Lion can be downloaded once and distributed by network, thumb drive, DVD, whatever. Or you can go to an Apple store (soon) and pick up a copy on a thumb drive. Or download your own using their network. And Lion is virtualizable.
Apple does do some custom motherboard and chip design, and works with the likes of Intel for some of it, particularly for special cases like the Air. Apple owns quite a bit of chip design talent.
Why wouldn't it? A private insurance company is going to want to attract customers by offering a low rate, then charge the ones who are accident prone or get sick a lot more.
I can't say how much decent health insurance in the US costs (from Canada), but I have heard Americans pay more for health care than anywhere else in the world. We've recruited a few senior ivy-league university professors from the US who were worried they wouldn't be able to afford adequate insurance when they got older.
Damn those baby boomers - special snowflakes every one. ;)
"What should I do about it?"
Lobby for health care reform?